The men off duty seem also to find plenty of occupation. For one thing there is always something to grumble at--either it rains, and the billets leak water through their broken-down roofs, or the mail does not arrive one day, or something of the kind happens--for the gunner is an inveterate "grouser" at trifles, although such incidents as being shelled only seem to amuse him. And then he can go to the nearest spot in which the inhabitants have still been allowed to remain, where he finds every cottage converted into an _estaminet_. There he may sit with a group of his friends drinking that strange beer that is about as intoxicating as tea and not quite so harmful, and he can grumble at that. Gunner Wolverhampton, the sheen upon whose nose indicates that he is probably something of a connoisseur in the matter of beer, says that it tastes like the water that mother washes the onions in, and I daresay it does. Here, sitting in these cottage parlours, you find him holding long conversations with their owners and perhaps a handful of French soldiers, in the curious language that is rapidly growing up. If there should be a girl in the place (her age or looks are quite immaterial) he cannot refrain from chaff. "You compree promnade?" he says. "Si, si," she replies. "Well, you come promnade with moi down the route, savvy?" She shakes her head. "You no bon," he says gravely. "Mais oui, moi j'suis bonne, mais vous méchant." "No bon, my dear, but portez two beers, twoppence, compree?" The way the two nations understand one another is amazing. "The old girl at the farm was telling me last night all about the time when the Bosches was here," said Gunner Wolverhampton to me one day. "How on earth did you manage to understand her?" I asked. "Oh, we got along famous," he replied, and very soon showed me that she had made him understand her remarks thoroughly. On one occasion, finding a party of French linesmen stranded for a length of wire, one of our telephonists gave them a piece, and ever afterwards the two batteries were on terms of the greatest intimacy. The men used to go and sit in one another's billets, frequently, after the manner of their kind, exchanging headgear as they did so, with the most curious effects, as when a burly gunner clad in a brown sweater and a French steel helmet, and carrying a long French rifle, strolled across the road. The startling resemblance he bore to a Cromwellian soldier made us all turn out to see him.